the kind of place where, as Mayor Richard Kimball put it, “it [is] hard to believe that something like this could happen.” Mostly, though, whether in dreariness or small-town naiveté, it was exceptional—the setting for a local tragedy, not the emblem of a national truth.
Williams was the simplest of all, a “lethal lothario,” a “sexual predator,” a “one-man plague,” a “monster.” Dr. Robert Berke, the Chautauqua County health commissioner, said, “He’s not a monster. … We have the devil here,” and Montel Williams told millions of television viewers that the death penalty would be the right punishment for what Williams had done. What he’d done, according to health and law-enforcement officials, was intentionally infect or try to infect young women with the AIDS virus—intent here resting solely on the fact that he’d been told he was HIV positive and didn’t tell them. He’s been charged with statutory rape for having sex with the thirteen-year-old, and further charges have been bruited: first-degree assault for every woman he had sex with who is now HIV positive, and reckless endangerment for every woman he had sex with who is HIV negative. Each assault rap could get him up to twenty-five years in prison; each endangerment rap, seven.
Chautauqua County district attorney James Subjack and New York State attorney general Dennis Vacco initially outdid each other in telling the media of their desire to prosecute Williams on such charges. Six months later, with no formal action taken, the two were being evasive, low-key, as if the legal machinery they’d endorsed with such confidence was flawed and they weren’t at all sure they wanted to try it out, once again, with all eyes watching.
A preview of the kind of justice Williams might expect upstate has already been played out in New York City. Like legions of young black and latin men caught in the criminal justice system for petty drug sales, Williams had been awaiting formal sentencing on the crack charge in the Bronx when the posters proclaiming him a public sex enemy went up. He had already sealed a plea bargain with the DA to serve one year in jail. Normally, a judge just approves such deals, but on February 20, 1998, Judge John Byrne of the Bronx Supreme Court threw Williams’ deal out—largely on account of the potent mix of rumor and allegation in Chautauqua County. Due process? Presumption of innocence? Integrity of a solemn promise? The same questions can be brought to bear on the decision by upstate officials to breach Williams’ confidentiality and convict him as a “cold-blooded murderer” in the court of public opinion. On the straightforward matter of the drug charge, Williams was given a Hobson’s choice: more jail time because of unproven and unrelated claims in a different jurisdiction; or the risk of a trial on a charge to which he had already, famously, pled guilty once. On April 20, Williams decided to abandon his plea and take his chances at trial.
In the state capital, meanwhile, New York legislators used the crisis to plump for a range of legislation that even Dr. Berke acknowledges would have done nothing to prevent it:
§ laws making it a felony for anyone who is HIV positive to have sex without first telling a partner;
§ laws forcing doctors to report the names of all positive cases to the state;
§ laws requiring persons who test positive to reveal the names of all their partners or face criminal charges;
§ laws establishing a state registry of everyone who tests positive;
§ laws allowing the use of this registry to divulge the names of positive individuals while notifying anyone who has ever had sex with them;
§ laws compelling the testing of prisoners, criminal defendants and arrested persons under a variety of circumstances.
None of those laws would have made any difference in the case of Nushawn Williams, who had an HIV test while at a county clinic for treatment of another sexually transmitted disease; who identified almost two dozen sex partners and agreed to let health officials contact them under the current system, which Berke says “worked perfectly in this case”; who went by so many aliases as to make name reporting irrelevant, was identified publicly under the “clear and imminent danger” provision of existing law, and may well be prosecuted even without a special statute criminalizing HIV status.
More important, they would have made no difference in protecting him from the virus in the first place, and they will make no difference in the lives of the young women of Jamestown—or in the lives of their mothers or sisters or kids. They will not make HIV-positive individuals more responsible to tell, partners more responsible to ask, or any of us more responsible to hold out for our own safety in time before, as one Jamestown woman put it, “the question Why am I doing this? gracefully turns into Why did I do that?”1
“What makes you vulnerable is what’s complicated,” said Amber Hollibaugh, national field director of women’s education services at Gay Men’s Health Crisis in New York. “It’s the secrets that people can’t talk about that put them at risk—always, always. It’s not a question of whether people do ‘risky things’; that doesn’t deal with the real issues in the lives of real women and real men.”
No one knows what goes on behind the doors in any town, just as no one knows what goes on between two people. But from what’s in plain sight, it’s hard to understand how anyone could consider Jamestown safe in the fullest sense of the word.
Nothing here rivals the devastation of parts of Buffalo—the ruined avenues empty at night but for a single driver and a guy powering his wheelchair through the mist. But neither is there the energy that animates other parts, even poor parts, of that wounded city. Jamestown’s inner city, mostly white and black neighborhoods where Williams and many of the young women lived, consists of solid blocks of two-story frame or brick houses on hilly streets that rise up sharply from a stretch of factories on one side of the Chadakoin River—the old Swede Hill—and lead more gently out of downtown and into what’s called the Valley on the other side. Rounding out the inner city, away from the center along Second Street, is the latin section. Only rarely do you find a house boarded up, and there are fine, even beautiful, structures here. But most are worn rough, and too many have doors lost, steps broken, hallways naked to the street. People make an effort or they don’t, but the effort is often too small and probably too hard-won as well—a garden but not the steps, a gate but not the door, a curtain but not the window, some Christmas lights but not a coat of paint. On these streets, most likely they don’t own the place anyway.
A lawyer named John Goodell told me he and others were angry that some reporters had said Jamestown was depressed. Indeed, the Jamestown Post-Journal printed a front-page story on November 7, 1997, lashing out at the national media and reminding readers of the city’s virtues. Goodell took this a bit further. “Have you seen our ghetto?” he asked. “I bet you’d be happy to have our ghetto in New York.” It seemed a slim choice, trading one zone of poverty for another, and all I could think of was Billy Preston’s words: “Nothing from nothing leaves nothing …”
I found myself raiding the icebox of pop culture a lot while in Jamestown, and not only because so many white, black and brown teenagers here testify to the universality of hip-hop style. There are also the city’s own contributions to the culture: Lucille Ball and 10,000 Maniacs. Lucy grew up here. The Lucy–Desi Museum, around the corner from the high school, is a monument to mirth and marriage, though if you find the right button to press and wait long enough you can hear how, just before the divorce, Lucy clenched her teeth, dug her long red nails into Desi’s shoulders and growled, “I could kill you.” The Maniacs have far less claim on the local consciousness, except that they practiced in a warehouse that became the focus of a satanic-cult hysteria here in the late 1980s. Parents kept children home from school in record numbers one Friday the 13th when word spread that blue-eyed blonde virgins would be sacrificed. Countercultural kids were considered the dangerous element in that panic; one of them wore a jacket to school with the slogan FUCK AUTHORITY and eventually had to leave town because he was so
